John “Devin” Biniaz was appointed deputy associate administrator for defense nuclear security, the National Nuclear Security Administration said this week.
In his new role at headquarters, Biniaz wil backstop Jeffrey Johnson, the head of the office responsible for physical and information security at the agency’s labs, plants and sites.
Biniaz was most recently assistant manager of safeguards and security at the Nevada National Security Site, where he has worked in numerous security-related roles since 2013, according to an internal announcement seen by Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
He was previously a federal employee at the Department of Defense, according to the announcement.
Responders have completely contained the Black Glass Canyon Wildfire that broke out Sunday at the Nevada National Security Site, the site wrote in a Facebook post Tuesday.
The site burned some 860 acres at Areas 25 and 29 and about five acres at Area 30, the site said. “The fire in Area 30 entered a radiologically contaminated area from a Cold War era test,” but “radiological exposures for onsite personnel are well below the criteria for initiating protective actions; there is no risk to health and human safety, and there is no offsite risk to the public,” the site said.
The Sandia National Laboratories took a “full-scale weapons system” for a spin, literally, in its new Sandia Superfuge/Centrifuge complex in Albuquerque, the labs network said this week.
“For the past decade, we’ve been running superfuge tests at Sandia, combining multiple environments. But we’ve really only done these tests on individual components and subassemblies,” Paulina Rabczak, an engineer from Sandia’s California laboratory, said in a press release.
“We’ve now successfully designed and built an extensive, large test fixture to support testing a full weapons system and put it through flight-like environments at the superfuge,” Rabczak said. “This is possibly the closest we can get to replicating an actual flight reentry event on the ground.”
Parts of the Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex were connected to the electric grid, the site announced this week in a press release.
The next-generation manufacturing plant for nuclear-weapons secondary stages is supposed to be completed by 2025.
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee verbally voted Thursday morning to advance Department of Energy nominees for general counsel and two other posts for consideration by the full Senate.
During the business meeting, the committee endorsed the nomination of Samuel Walsh to be DOE’s general counsel, Andrew Light to be assistant secretary for international affairs and Shalanda Baker to be the agency’s director of the Office of Minority Economic Impact.
The session was webcast. After the voice vote on Baker, a couple of Republican senators did ask to be formally recorded as voting “no” on her nomination.
Walsh, a former DOE deputy general counsel who is now partner in a Washington law firm, was nominated by President Joe Biden in April and had her confirmation hearing in June.
The same nomination-and-hearing timeline applies to Light and Baker. Light is a philosophy professor at George Mason University in Virginia who is also a distinguished senior fellow in the climate program at the World Resources Institute in Washington, D.C. Baker is already at DOE as a senior adviser, according to her online bio. Prior to taking that post in January, Baker was professor of law, public policy, and urban affairs at Northeastern University in Boston. She was also co-founder and co-director of the Initiative for Energy Justice.
